Kenny Noyes
The "other" American rookie
Ben Spies wasn't the only American making his debut as a full-time rider in the MotoGP series weekend. Kenny Noyes, an American ex-pat living in Barcelona, rode in the inaugural Moto2 Grand Prix for a team owned by Spanish actor Antonio Banderas. Noyes has been riding motorcycles his whole life, but came late to racing. Now 30, he's been a regular at the front of the Spanish championship for several years. Last year he finished fourth on a Kawasaki in the Formula Xtreme class, the year before he was fifth on a Suzuki.
Noyes raised some eyebrows with fast preseason testing times on the same Spanish tracks where he'd been racing for years. That experience did him little good in Qatar, one of the many tracks he'll race on for the first time this year.
"For sure, those are my home tracks," he said at Qatar between practice and qualifying. "Here, the setup's pretty different. It's a really fast track, and you only get one hour on Friday to learn and find your setup and find your tire and your gearing, so it's pretty tight. So we get to the tracks and it's hard for us to do it all in one hour. Then on Saturday validate that, then qualify. So I think that's going to be the biggest challenge," at the new tracks, "which are most of them." Noyes has ridden on five of the 17 tracks.
In a field with vast world championship experience, Noyes finished his first practice 21st out of 41. "Out here it's hard," he said. "It seems like you're really far back, and you are from the front, but then you look behind and there's 20 good guys behind you also." The team then made a mistake with tire management, and Noyes was on a used tire late in qualifying when everyone sped up. He would start his first Grand Prix from 30th on the grid. "We have five soft and four hard (tires) and we didn't know which one was better, so I used one in each free practice to validate which one was better." Noyes, said, and "I didn't expect it to be that quick at the end. We kinda underestimated it."
By the end of the first lap, Noyes had already picked off 10 riders. By the 10th of 20 laps he was in the top ten. But the tide had already turned. "The rear tire never reached its operating range and about lap ten it started sliding in every corner," Noyes said. "It just shredded the sides. Even going into the fast corners, just let off the throttle and it would snap sideways. And as soon as it did that a couple times, I thought, 'Man, I just got to stay on two wheels.'"
Still, Noyes came away from his first Grand Prix encouraged. "I was real happy," he said, despite finishing 18th of 41, "especially starting 30th." And with the postponement of the Japanese GP at Motegi, another track Noyes has never seen, the second round moved to Jerez de la Frontera.
"That was nice," Noyes said. "I wanted to go and see Japan and all that side of it, but having my second race be (in Spain) is much, much easier. I think in October we'll be more ready for it."